AMD Socket AM4 transition to take years

A three months old confidential slide from AMD was leaked this week, showing off the company's plans for the transition to Socket AM4 and the Zen core. As Kitguru reports, the move towards the highly anticipated Zen core is going to take some time. The first chips are expected to hit the market in Q2 or Q3 2016 and it will take until well into 2017 before the majority of AMD's products switches to Zen.

The first chip to use AM4 will be the “Bristol Ridge” (BrR) accelerated processing unit with four “Excavator” cores, Radeon graphics based on the GCN 1.2 architecture, a dual-channel memory controller as well as basic input/output capabilities. The “Bristol Ridge” is due to be launched in July, 2016. The APU will be aimed at the mainstream part of the market and will be quite inexpensive. Unfortunately, it will only be 10 to 15 per cent faster than existing A-series APUs at the same clock-rates, which means that it will not be able to address the high-end segment of the market.